London Letter: Mixter Kitkat and his confederacy of dunces

Politicians who have the most fun seem to be the loony left parties that shout to the rafters protesting about everything, but never have to do anything about it.

Except every now and again nature plays a cruel trick and they get elected.

This happened recently to the Green Party where, to the surprise of all and especially themselves, they won the local elections in Brighton.

They now control the city council. Before I go any further, I had better explain Brighton.

It used to be a small conservative-voting fishing village until the rock group The Who made it famous in a song called Pinball Wizard in the 1960s.

Then the hipsters moved in and a new phenomenon occurred in British politics; instead of the natives revolting against newcomers, as is happening in many areas with mass immigration, in Brighton the newcomers revolted against the natives. The greenie hipsters now run the show.

It’s hilarious – well, unless you live in Brighton.

The usual bang-on gimmicky policies were immediately introduced such as gender-neutral toilets and allowing people to identify as Mr, Mrs or Mx (which means Mixter, ie you don’t consider yourself a man or woman).

Then there was the ‘meat free Monday’ plan, which backfired when all the dustbin collectors threatened to go on strike if they didn’t get their bacon butties (sandwiches) for breakfast.

When the city inevitably went broke due to these trendy policies the council leader, a guy called Jason Kitkat (yes, I know) proposed a 4.75% tax increase that he insisted be endorsed in a referendum. Eventually someone with a little more financial nous than Kitkat pointed out that the cost of the referendum — estimated at £900 000 — would itself solve some of their financial woes.

Mr, Mrs or Mx Kitkat and his colleagues next started imposing £50,000 fines to eradicate the biggest sin (after racism, feminism, homophobism, ageism and isms as yet undiscovered) in the greenie universe – failing to recycle.

That’s right: you’d have to pony up the equivalent of almost R1-million for putting a piece of plastic in a paper-only bin. However, thanks to a toxic mix of incompetence, misinformation, a chaotic recycling system and disruptions from the bin collectors, people have given up trying to do ‘the right thing’. They dump waste in any bin.

The result? Green Brighton now ranks 302nd out of 326 councils for its appalling recycling record.

Strike of the bin brigade

The bin collectors finally did go on strike. It’s unclear whether this was over the shambolic recycling system or bacon butties, but they refused to collect trash, much to the delight of the seagulls that feasted on waist-high piles of rubbish.

This presented a serious challenge to the Greens – not in resolving the strike, but whether they should ‘take to the barricades’ with the oppressed. So we had the belly-laugh of the decade watching councillors striking with workers striking against the council.

Predictably they also erected 100km² of wind farms, which may provide electricity for a few houses in the future, and destroyed pristine woodlands in the process.

For most of us Bob Dylan’s song ‘Blowing in the wind’ is an adolescent ‘60s lyric. For the Greens, it’s serious policy, man. These turbines stand 500m tall and blight the landscape like nothing else. But as once a resident remarked, at least they will kill off the seagulls, which makes them useful when the bin collectors go on strike.

Now comes the final straw. The Greens want to build an idol to their deity, the goddess Gaia. They’re not calling it that of course – it’s officially ‘a celebration’ of sustainability and progressive ideology. It’s going to be a 400m tower to be erected on the beach that would look hip in San Francisco, but something from Mars in a sleepy seaside resort.

It’s going to be built totally out of recycled and sustainable materials. Natch.

To me, this particular monstrosity says more about the Greens than anything else. To them, environmentalism doesn’t mean conserving the countryside, protecting woodland or ancient meadows.

It means recycling junk. Rather like their policies.